AMP Email

[00:00:00]
>> Rodriguez: There's this thing called Amp Free Email. So is everybody familiar with AMP just as a project? It's called Accelerated Mobile Pages. So it's a project that was developed by Google, in theory to provide a better experience on mobile devices. Whether or not it accomplishes that goal, I see some shaking heads on your side here.

[00:00:20]
But in theory, what it does is strips out a lot of the JavaScript or the assets, things that are a heavy payload for browsers. And makes a simplified version of content on mobile devices. There's a lot of debate about whether or not it's a good thing to do.

[00:00:38]
It's interesting because Google's kinda using it to drive search results, and work with advertisers and publishers to drive that. So they definitely have business reasons why they're pushing something like this. But in the email world, last year they announced this idea of AMP for email. And so it's not so much about providing a lighter weight mobile experience for email campaigns.

[00:00:59]
It's more about adding interactivity into the inbox. So the best way to show this off is really going in. I don't have a hand coded version but they have a good playground. And there's a reason why I haven't devoted a lot of time into hand coding my own versions of AMP for Email.

[00:01:15]
But let's look at what something like this looks like. So if we go over to here, you can see they have really good documentation around AMP for email, and just AMP in general. So the developers.google.com/gmail has some good Gmail documentation. But then they have this entire website about AMP called amp.dev.

[00:01:40]
So you can go into the documentation, the different tools, look at where it's supported, different tools for creating AMP based emails. Right now the only tool that really supports like a drag and drop WYSIWYG experience is Stripo, which is interesting. But then you can see it's one of the main things, one of the problems with AMP for Email is that there's not wide adoption for it, yet.

[00:02:01]
And that largely depend on how this works. So you can see only a couple of different ESPs or services support sending AMP for Email. And that's because you're essentially sending a third version of your email campaign. So any HTML email you send, you're sending the HTML version. And then you're sending a plain text version of that email as well.

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And those are sent using those MIME types. So it's this little package that's delivered with your e-mail. So depending on the user's preference if they want to see that HTML e-mail, it'll load that HTML e-mail, that MIME type, and display it. If they have it set up so they prefer plain text e-mails, it'll fall back to that plain text version of your email.

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So AMP for Email is creating this third MIME type, this AMP MIME type. So anytime you wanna send one, you have to use a tool that is set up to send that third MIME type. And right now only a few of them are. The other thing is that not many email clients support this.

[00:03:03]
So it's not even available across all of Gmail, there's different versions. So Gmail doesn't fully support displaying these AMP versions of their emails. Right now, Outlook.com is testing out support for AMP for Email. I think Yahoo or AOL maybe as they say on here. Another web browser is testing out support for AMP for Emails.

[00:03:28]
But there's not a ton of support for actually displaying this stuff. And on top of that, the third thing kind of setting us all back is, which is actually a good thing, is it requires more serious security for sending, for you as a sender. So you have to have DCAM and an SPF and DMARC.

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All these different security settings set up on your sending server that Google can then validate. And make sure you're a trusted center before you start sending these interactive emails. But once you do that, and once support gets better, you could, in theory, do some really advanced interactive stuff that you couldn't do using just a check box hack without a lot of work.

[00:04:09]
Just using this abstracted away version of HTML. So here this is kind of their boilerplate hello world type email. You can see we have a little content switcher down here. And the way that's working is by using this proprietary markup language for AMP. So instead of HTML, you can see this amp-carousel and amp-image.

[00:04:30]
So it's really easy to build out these interactive experiences. But right now, nobody really supports that. Which kind of sucks, I mean, it's good and bad. I would argue that relying on standard HTML and CSS to achieve this stuff is a better route than using something that's almost entirely controlled by Google.

[00:04:49]
It is for all intents and purposes, proprietary to them to achieve some of this stuff. But you can do some really cool stuff, you can do text binding, which will allow you to create these more interactive forms and send those forms back to a server a lot easier than you could using HTML and CSS.

[00:05:09]
They have a full form that you could fill out to get subscriber feedback. They have different examples for animation, an image lightbox, which is kind of interesting. So it's this really cool idea for adding all this interactivity, but the thing to note is that there's not wide support for it.

[00:05:29]
And I don't expect as somebody that's been in the industry for the better part of a decade. Based on experiments like these with Gmail and other providers, I don't expect there to be wide support for it anytime soon. There are some examples of this out in the wild that they've done kinda a proof of concept, Pinterest is using it.

[00:05:49]
Booking.com I think is using it. There's some really cool stuff they're doing, Pinterest is. But again, it's gonna take a while for everybody else to get on board, if they ever get on board.